Several lizards darted briskly in and out of the cracks of a
hollow tree. They understood each other perfectly, for they all
spoke lizard language.

"My! How it rumbles and buzzes in the old elf mound," said
one lizard. "It rumbles and bumbles so that I haven't had a
wink of sleep for the past two nights. I might as well have a
toothache, for that also prevents me from sleeping."

"There's something afoot," said another lizard. "Until
the cock crowed for dawn, they had the mound propped up on four
red poles to give it a thoroughgoing airing. And the elf maidens
are learning to stamp out some new dances. Something is surely
afoot."

"Yes, I was just talking about it with an earthworm I know,"
said a third lizard. "He came straight from the mound, where he
has been nosing around night and day. He overheard a good deal.
For he can't see, poor thing, but he knows his way around
and makes an uncommonly good eavesdropper. They expect company in
the elf mound, distinguished visitors, but the earthworm
wouldn't say who they are. Or maybe he didn't know.
All the will-o'-the-wisps have been told to parade with their
torches, as they are called, and all of the flat silver and gold
plate with which the hill is well stocked is being polished and
put out in the moonlight."

"Who can the visitors be?" the lizards all wanted to
know. "What in the world is going on? Listen to the hustle!
listen to the bustle!"

Just at that moment the elf mound opened, and an old-maid
elf minced out of it. The woman had no back, but otherwise she
was quite properly dressed, with her amber jewelry in the shape
of a heart. She kept house for her distant cousin, the old king
of the elves, and she was very spry in the legs. Trip,
trot, away she went. How she hurried and scurried off to see
the night raven down in the marsh.

"You are hereby invited to the elf mound, this very night,"
she told him. "But may I ask you to do us a great favor first?
Please deliver the other invitations for us. As you have no place
of your own where you can entertain, you must make yourself
generally useful. We shall have some very distinguished
visitors-goblins of rank, let me tell you. So the old elf king
wants to make the best impression he can."

"Who is being invited?" the night raven asked.

"Oh, everybody may come to the big ball-even ordinary
mortals if they talk in their sleep or can do anything else that
we can do. But at the banquet the company must be strictly
select. Only the very best people are invited to it. I've
threshed that out thoroughly with the elf king, because I insist
we should not even invite ghosts. First of all, we must invite
the old man of the sea and his daughters. I suppose they
won't like to venture out on dry land, but we can at least
give them a comfortable wet stone to sit on, or something better,
and I don't think they'll refuse this time. Then we
must have all the old trolls of the first degree, with tails. We
must ask the old man of the stream, and the brownies, and I
believe we should ask the grave-pig, the bone-horse, and the
church dwarf, though they live under churches and, properly
speaking, belong to the clergy, who are not our sort of people at
all. Still that is their vocation, and they are closely related
to us, and often come to call."

"Cra!" said the night raven as he flew to summon the
guests.

On their mound, the elf maidens had already begun to dance,
and they danced with long scarves made of mist and moonlight. To
those who care for scarf dancing, it was most attractive.

The large central hall of the elf mound had been especially
prepared for this great night. The floor was washed with
moonlight, and the walls were polished with witch wax, which made
them glisten like the petals of a tulip. The kitchen abounded
with skewered frogs, snakeskins stuffed with small
children's fingers, fungus salad made of mushroom-seed, wet
mouse noses, and hemlock. There was beer of the swamp
witch's brewing, and sparkling salpeter champagne from
graveyard vaults. All very substantial! Rusty nails and ground
glass from church windows were among the delicacies.

The old elf king had his gold crown polished with powdered
slate pencil. It was a prize pupil's slate pencil, and a
prize pupil's slate pencil is not so easy for an elf king
to obtain. The curtains in the bedroom were freshly starched with
snail slime. Oh, how they did hustle and bustle.

"Now we shall burn horsehair and pig's bristles for
incense, and my duty is done," said the housekeeper.

"Dear papa elf," said his youngest daughter, "will you tell
me now who the guests of honor are to be?"

"Well," he said, "it's high time that I told you. I
have made a match for two of my daughters. Two of you must be
ready to get married without fail. The venerable goblin chief of
Norway, who lives in the old Dovrefjeld Mountains, and possesses
a gold mine and crag castles and strongholds much better than
people can imagine, is on his way here with his two sons, and
each son wants a wife. The old goblin chief is a real Norwegian,
honest and true, straightforward and merry. I have known him for
many a year, and we drank to our lasting friendship when he came
here to get his wife. She's dead now, but she was the
daughter of the king of the chalk cliffs at Möen. I used to
tell him that he got married on the chalk, as if he had bought
his wife on credit. How I look forward to seeing him again. His
sons, they say, are rough and rowdy. But they'll improve
when they get older. It's up to you to polish them."

"How soon will they come?" one of his daughters asked.

"That depends on the wind and the weather," he said. "They
are thrifty travelers, they will come by ship when they have a
chance. I wanted them to travel overland, by way of Sweden, but
the old gentleman wouldn't hear of it. He doesn't
keep up with the times, and I don't like that."

Just then two will-o'-the-wisps came tumbling in, one faster
than the other and therefore he got there first. Both of them
were shouting:

His daughters lifted their long scarves and curtsied low to
the ground.

There came the venerable goblin chief from the Dovrefjeld,
crowned with sparkling icicles and polished fir cones, muffled in
his bearskin coat, and wearing his sledge-boots. His sons dressed
quite differently, with their throats uncovered and without
suspenders. They were husky fellows.

"Is that a hill?" The smallest of the two brothers pointed
his finger at the elf mound. In Norway we would call it a
hole."

"Son!" cried the old goblin chief. "Hills come up, and holes
go down. Have you no eyes in your head?"

The only thing that amazed them, they said, was the language
that people spoke here. Why, they could actually understand
it."

"Don't make such tomfools of yourselves," said their
father, "or people will think you ignoramuses."

They entered the elf mound, where all the best people were
gathered, though they assembled so fast that they seemed swept in
by the wind. Nevertheless the arrangements were delightfully
convenient for everybody. The old man of the sea and his
daughters were seated at the table in large casks of water, which
they said made them feel right at home. Everybody had good table
manners except the two young Norwegian goblins, who put their
feet on the table as if anything they did were all right.

"Take your feet out of your plates," said the old goblin
chief, and they obeyed, but not right away. They had brought fir
cones in their pockets to tickle the ladies sitting next to them.
To make themselves comfortable, they pulled off their boots and
gave them to the ladies to hold. However, their father, the old
Dovre goblin, conducted himself quite differently. He talked well
of the proud crags of Norway, and of waterfalls rushing down in a
cloud of spray, with a roar like thunder and the sound of an
organ. He told how the salmon leap up through the waterfall, when
they hear the nixies twang away on golden harps. He described
bracing winter nights on which the sleigh bells chime, and boys
with flaming torches skim over polished ice so clear that one can
see the startled fish swish away underfoot. Yes, he had a way of
talking that made you both hear and see the sawmill sawing and
the boys and girls as they sang and danced the Norwegian Hallinge
dance. Hurrah! In the wink of an eye the goblin chief gave the
old-maid elf such a kiss that it smacked, though they
weren't in the least related.

Then the elf maidens must do their dances, first the
ordinary dances and then the dance where they stamped their feet,
which set them off to perfection. Then they did a really
complicated one called, "A dance to end dancing." Keep us and
save us, how light they were on their feet. Whose leg was whose?
Which were arms and which were legs? They whipped through the air
like shavings at a planing mill. The girls twirled so fast that
it made the bone-horse's head spin, and he staggered away
from the table.

"Whir-r-r," said the goblin chief. "The girls are lively
enough, but what can they do besides dancing like mad, spinning
like tops, and making the bone-horse dizzy?"

"I'll show you what they can do," the elf king
boasted. He called his youngest daughter. She was as thin and
fair as moonlight. She was the most dainty of all the sisters,
and when she took a white wand in her mouth it vanished away.
That was what she could do. But the goblin chief said this was an
art he wouldn't like his wife to possess, and he
didn't think his sons would either.

The second daughter could walk alongside herself as if she
had a shadow, which is something that trolls don't possess.
The third was a very different sort of girl. She had studied
brewing with the swamp witch, and she was a good hand at
seasoning alder stumps with glowworms.

"Now this one would make a good housewife," said the goblin
chief, winking instead of drinking to her, for he wanted to keep
his wits clear.

The fourth daughter played upon a tall, golden harp. As soon
as she fingered the first string everyone kicked up his left leg,
for all of the troll tribe are left-legged. And as soon as she
fingered the second string, everyone had to do just as she
said.

"What a dangerous woman," said the goblin chief. His sons
were very bored, and they strolled out of the elf mound as their
father asked, "What can the next daughter do?"

"I have learned to like Norwegians," she told him.
"I'll never marry unless I can live in Norway."

But her youngest sister whispered in the old goblin's
ear, "She only says that because of the old Norwegian saying,
that even though the world should fall the rocks of Norway would
still stand tall, that's why she wants to go there.
She's afraid to die."

"Hee, hee," said the goblin, "somebody let the cat out of
the bag. Now for the seventh and last."

"The sixth comes before the seventh," said the elf king, who
was more careful with his arithmetic. But the sixth daughter
would not come forward.

"I can only tell the truth," she said, "so nobody likes me,
and I have enough to do to sew upon my shroud."

Now came the seventh and last daughter. What could she do?
She could tell tales, as many as ever she pleased.

"Here are my five fingers," said the old goblin. "Tell me a
story for each of them."

The elf maiden took him by the wrist, and he chuckled till
he almost choked. When she came to the fourth finger, which wore
a gold ring just as if it knew that weddings were in the air, the
old goblin said, "Hold it fast, for I give you my hand.
I'll take you to wife myself."

The elf maiden said that the stories of Guldbrand, the
fourth finger, and of little Peter Playfellow, the fifth finger,
remained to be told.

"Ah, we shall save those until winter," said the old goblin
chief. "Then you shall tell me about the fir tree and the birch;
of the ghost presents and of the creaking frost. You will be our
teller of tales, for none of us has the knack of it. We shall sit
in my great stone castle where the pine logs blaze, and we shall
drink our mead out of the golden horns of old Norwegian kings. I
have two that water goblin washed into my hand. And while we sit
there side by side, Sir Garbo will come to call, and he will sing
you the mountain maidens' song. How merry we then shall be!
The salmon will leap in the waterfall, and beat against our stone
walls, but he'll never get in to where we sit so snug. Ah,
I tell you, it is good to live in glorious old Norway. But where
have the boys gone?"

Where indeed? They were charging through the fields, blowing
out the will-o'-the-wisps who were coming so modestly for their
torchlight parade.

"Is that a way to behave?" said the goblin chief. "I have
chosen a stepmother for you, so come and choose wives of your
own."

But his sons said they preferred speeches and drink to
matrimony. So they made speeches, and they drank healths, and
turned their glasses bottom side up to show how empty they were.
Then they took off their coats, and lay down on the table to
sleep, for they had no manners. But the old goblin danced around
the room with his young bride, and changed his boots for hers,
which was much more fashionable than merely exchanging rings.

"There's that cock crowing!" the old-maid housekeeper
of the elves warned them. "Now we must close the shutters to keep
the sun from burning us."

So they closed the mound. But outside the lizards darted
around the hollow tree, and one said to the other: "Oh, how we
liked that old Norwegian goblin chief!"

"I preferred his jolly sons," said the earthworm, but then
he had no eyes in his head, poor thing.